Journal entries in 'Random Crap I Found On The Internet' for May, 2005

I just discovered MIT's OpenCourseWare, which appears to be a repository of the course materials for most or all of MIT's courses, available for free and without registration on the web. I went straight to the Computer Science section and immediately found two courses on Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2002, Spring 2003). They actually appear to be the same course, but taught by two different teachers, and the materials seem pretty different. It will probably be interesting to go through both of them.

This website might be a godsend, since I tend to be pretty good at learning things on my own. Of course it's very helpful to have a knowledgeable professor to explain it and to ask questions of, but I can certainly pick up most of it from the course material alone. It's like it was made specifically for people like me — too lazy do do well enough in school to get into MIT, but willing to do a little extra work to learn some of the stuff anyway :)

Update: Actually, I hadn't seen the XTutor section for each course, which seems to be a full set of recorded audio lectures by the professors, along with matching lecture slides, full transcripts, and lecture handouts. There are also weekly online interactive homework problems. In other words, that's pretty damn close to what I would get by taking the course in person. Now I'm even more excited.

I was reading a blog entry describing a cool website that analyzes your NetFlix rental statistics, and I decided to finally subscribe to NetFlix as I've been considering for months. I clicked the link to NetFlix in the blog entry and started filling out the subscription forms.

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I remember reading about the creations of Theo Jansen years ago, but Jason Kottke's recent post about Jansen reminded me just how cool the guy is. He's a Dutch artist who has been building 'beach animals' for about 14 years now. He makes huge walking skeletons out of plastic yellow tubes, with big sail-like spines to catch the wind, which they use as a source of power. They have valves and pneumatic "muscles" that they use to move their 11-segment limbs. As this Wired article says, "Over the years, successive generations of his creatures have evolved into increasingly complex animals that walk by flapping wings in response to the wind, discerning obstacles in their path through feelers and even hammering themselves into the sand on sensing an approaching storm."

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This article on Web Browser Forensics (Part 1, Part 2) describes some of the tools and methods we use when investigating a suspected intrusion. I thought some of you might find it interesting/creepy to see how much information can be retrieved from the digital wake your web browser creates as you browse. Some of it is kind of technical, but if you're not interested in the details you can skim through part 1 and look at the screenshots of the various tools and get the gist of what's possible. Example: a cached Hotmail page.

The information described in the article is retrieved from the web browser's cache and history files. Internet Explorer ostensibly lets the user erase their cache and history, but it's interesting to note that the Content.IE5/index.dat and History.IE5/index.dat files — which contain the listing of visited URLs — are not erased when this occurs. In other words, IE will delete the cached content itself but preserves the list of URLs a user has visited. These files are locked by the operating system on startup, so they can't even be deleted manually under normal conditions. To remove them, you have to reboot your computer into command prompt mode and delete them from there. This "feature" has proved useful to us but not as beneficial for the users we've investigated.

Hal Bergman lives in LA and updages his PhotoBlog daily. He's incredibly talented — it's another one of those sites that makes me wistful to see, because every photo makes me yearn for the ability to produce such work.

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Someone with lots of time and a crippling obsession for Zelda created HySpace. Get Old Man's sage insight on a life spent living in fire-lit caves. Read Fish Man's thoughts about life in the sea (sadly, he doesn't say "qveeee!"). Be sure to check out Lord Jabun's profile. And I can tell you right now that no, you probably won't find this funny unless you too have an unhealthy obsession with Zelda. But if you spent your childhood fighting LikeLikes and Digdoggers and being mad about how Error's name doesn't make any sense, you might enjoy it. :)

Some kids at MIT are having a Time Traveller Convention this evening. Their intention was for it to become so widely publicized that it would be remembered far into the future, so that if time travel is ever invented, people can travel back in time and attend.

They've specified exact coordinates for the event in latitude, longitude, and time. However, a few things worry me. First of all, they don't specify altitude (i.e. distance from the center of the Earth). Warping in just 50 feet off in either direction could be unpleasant. Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration is that the Earth is travelling at 30 km/sec around the Sun. Being just a few seconds off in your calculations would place you in the bitter cold of space. Even if you do match the speed of the Earth, you need to consider its rotation, and warp in with the right amount of lateral velocity. At the equator, the surface of the Earth revolves at 1670 km/hr. Warping in without matching that speed would send you flying into a wall at around Mach 1.4.

One last concern, as pointed out by a Slashdotter:

Seeing the location depicted so accurately, I have only one fear...

Telefrags.

The things one finds while browsing WikiPedia at random. I came across the programming language called COW (WikiPedia entry), which is written in a language that cows can understand. Since the only word that cows know is 'moo', all commands in COW are variants of the word 'moo', with differing capitalization.

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